But of far greater beauty are the panels for the high altar of S. Peter’s, also painted for Cardinal Stefaneschi, and now to be seen in the sacristy, where the more obvious beauties of Melozzo da Forli’s music-making angels too often lead to their being overlooked. And yet, unnoticed in the dark corners of the room, they have escaped the attentions of restorers and glow with all the rare translucency of Giotto’s tempera.
These are the first pictures we have examined by Giotto in which we are able to appreciate at all the beauty and subtlety of his tone contrasts, for not only have the frescoes of the upper church at Assisi and the “Madonna” of the Academy suffered severely from restoration, but it is probable that in his youthful works he had not freed himself altogether from the harsher tonality of earlier art. Here, however, Giotto shows that power which is distinctive of the greatest masters of paint, of developing a form within a strictly limited scale of tone, drawing out of the slightest contrasts their fullest expressiveness for the rendering of form; a method which, though adopted from an intuitive feeling for pure beauty, gives a result which can only be described as that of an enveloping atmosphere surrounding the forms.[31]
The kneeling figure, presumably Cardinal Stefaneschi himself, in the “Christ enthroned” is an admirable instance of this quality. With what tender, scarcely perceptible gradations, with what a limited range from dark to light is the figure expressed; and yet it is not flat, the form is perfectly realised between the two sweeping curves whose simplicity would seem, but for the masterly modelling, to prevent the possibility of their containing a human figure. The portrait is as remarkable in sentiment as in execution. The very conception of introducing a donor into such a composition was new.[32] It was a sign of the new individualism which marked the whole of the great period of Italian art, and finally developed into extravagance. The donor having once found his way into pictures of sacred ceremonial remained, but he not infrequently found it difficult to comport himself becomingly amid celestial surroundings; as he became more important, and heaven itself became less so, he asserted himself with unseemly self-assurance, until at last his matter-of-fact countenance, rendered with prosaic fidelity, stares out at the spectator in contemptuous indifference to the main action of the composition, the illusion of which it effectually destroys.
But here, where the idea is new, it has no such jarring effect; it is not yet a stereotyped formula, an excuse for self-advertisement or social display, but the direct outcome of a poetical and pious thought; and Giotto, with his unique rightness of feeling, has expressed, by the hand clinging to the throne and the slightly bent head, just the appropriate attitude of humble adoration, which he contrasts with the almost nonchalant ease and confidence of the angels. Even in so purely ceremonial a composition as this Giotto contrives to create a human situation.
In the planning of this picture Giotto has surpassed not only Duccio’s and Cimabue’s versions of the Enthronement motive but his own earlier work at Florence. The throne, similar in construction to that in the Academy picture, no longer shows the inconsistencies of two conflicting styles, but is of pure and exquisitely proportioned Gothic; the difficult perspective of the arches at the side is rendered with extraordinary skill though without mathematical accuracy. The relation of the figure of Christ to the throne is here entirely satisfactory, with the result that the great size of the figure no longer appears unnatural, but as an easily accepted symbol of divinity. In the drawing of the face of the Christ he has retained the hieratic solemnity given by the rigid delineation of Byzantine art.
But if the “Christ enthroned” is a triumph of well-calculated proportions, the “Crucifixion of S. Peter” which formed one side of the triptych, is even more remarkable for the beauty of its spacing and the ingenuity of its arrangement.
In designing such a panel with its narrow cusped arch and gold background, the artist’s first consideration must be its effect as mere pattern when seen on the altar at the end of a church. In his frescoes, Giotto’s first preoccupation was with the drama to be presented; here it was with the effect of sumptuous pattern.
And the given data out of which the pattern was to be made were by no means tractable. The subject of the Crucifixion of S. Peter was naturally not a favourite one with artists, and scarcely any succeeded in it entirely, even in the small dimensions of a predella piece, to which it was generally relegated. For it is almost impossible to do away with the unpleasant effect of a figure seen thus upside down. The outstretched arms, which in the crucifixion of Christ give a counterbalancing line to the long horizontal of the spectators, here only increases the difficulty of the single upright. But Giotto, by a brilliant inspiration,[33] found his solution in the other fact given by his subject—namely, that the martyrdom took place between the goals of the Circus of Nero. By making these huge pyramids adapted from two well-known Roman monuments (the Septizonium and the pyramid of Cestius), he has obtained from the gold background just that dignified effect of spreading out above and contracting below which is so effective in renderings of the crucifixion of Christ, an effect which he still further emphasises by the two angels, whose spreading wings and floating draperies increase the brocade-like richness of the symmetrical pattern.
Nor, the pattern once assured, has Giotto failed of vivid dramatic presentation. It is surprising to find crowded into so small a space so many new poses all beautifully expressive of the individual shades of a common feeling: the woman to the left of the cross leaning her head on her hand as though sorrow had become a physical pain; the beautiful figure of the youth, with long waving hair, who throws back both arms with a despairing gesture; the woman lifting her robe to wipe her tears; and, most exquisite of all, and most surprising, in its novelty and truth to life, the figure of the girl to the left, drawn towards the terrible scene by a motion of sympathy and yet shrinking back with instinctive shyness and terror. In the child alone Giotto has, as was usually the case, failed of a rhythmical and expressive pose. And what an entirely new study of life is seen here in the variety of the types! In one—the man whose profile cuts the sky to the left—he seems to have been indebted to some Roman portrait-bust; another, on horseback to the left, is clearly a Mongolian type, with slant eyes and pigtail, a curious proof of the intercourse with the extreme East which the Franciscan missionaries had already established. In the drawing of the nude figure of S. Peter, in spite of the unfortunate proportion of the head, the same direct study of nature has enabled Giotto to realise the structure of the figure more adequately than any artist since Roman times. One can well understand the astonishment and delight of Giotto’s contemporaries at this unfolding of the new possibilities of art, which could now interpret all the variety and richness of human life and could so intensify its appeal to the emotions. One other peculiarity of this picture is interesting and characteristic of Giotto’s attitude. In painting the frame of his panel he did not merely add figures as decorative and symbolic accessories, he brought them into relation with the central action, for each of them gazes at S. Peter with a different expression of pity and grief. Giotto had to be dramatic even in his frames.[34]
That Giotto remained in Rome till after the great Jubilee of 1300 is shown by the fragment of his fresco of the Papal Benediction which still remains on a pillar of S. John Lateran. There is every probability that at this time he met Dante, who was collecting the materials for the terrible portrait of Boniface VIII. which he drew in the “Inferno.”